Saeed Naqvi is a former newspaper editor and a widely
travelled Indian political analyst and commentator on diplomatic affairs
(Caravan)

Members of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh take part in a
physical and martial drill with sticks.

There has always been a symbiotic relationship between India’s oldest
political party and the Hindutva organization linked to Gandhi’s assassins

By Saeed Naqvi

By triggering a debate on its Op-ed page last week, “The
Hindu”, possibly unintentionally, lifted the scab from an old wound for many of
us. The debate, initiated by Vidya Subramaniam’s column (October 8), had
its locus elsewhere: the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh’s (RSS) growing
stranglehold on the Bharatiya Janata Party. Her point was that the RSS’s
relationship with the BJP violates a commitment the RSS made to India’s first
home minister, Sardar Patel, before it was unbanned on July 11, 1949.

Remember, the RSS had been banned four days after Mahatma
Gandhi’s assassination on Jan 30, 1948. But S. Gurumurthy of the RSS, in the
course of establishing his rebuttal, wanders into the attitudes of senior
Congress leaders towards the RSS. The Congress Working Committee, as is well
known, was divided on this issue as it was on the country’s partition. The
Congress has historically fudged these issues.

Gurumurthy clinches the fact that the RSS violated no
agreement, by quoting then Home Minister of Bombay, Morarji Desai, a Patel
acolyte. In a written statement to the Bombay Legislative Assembly Sep 14,
1949, Desai admitted that the ban on the RSS was lifted “unconditionally”.

When, returning from Muzaffarnagar after last month’s
orchestrated, piecemeal ethnic cleansing, I heard exactly the same anti-Muslim
slogans I had heard during the Gujarat riots
in 1969, it did hurt. On that occasion Badshah Khan, the Frontier Gandhi, put
down anchor in that city for nearly a month because he could not believe what
he saw — 512 people killed in what Justice Jaganmohan Reddy called “largely
one-sided riots”. Handbills calling for a “religious war” were distributed “to
the rioters by the RSS and the Jana Sangh”. Congressmen joined the chorus that
“Muslims were anti-national”. Yes, in 1969.

I had a ringside seat with Badshah Khan that year. “The
Statesman” had loaned my services to function as the Frontier Gandhi’s press
adviser. This was at Jayaprakash Narayan’s behest. Since Indira Gandhi had
split the Congress, Badshah Khan’s utterances were being carefully weighed by
both sides. Was he favoring Indira Congress or the Syndicate Congress?

The issue of which way Badshah Khan would tilt was settled
by the horrible communal situation in Ahmedabad. He was pained at Chief
Minister Hitendra Desai’s alleged communal bias during the riots. And he saw
the chief minister, a political descendent of the Patel line. At this stage
Badshah Khan had more or less accepted Ram Manohar Lohia’s list of the Guilty
Men of India’s Partition.

These “Guilty Men” were, in his book, not terribly averse to
association with the RSS as Gurumurthy makes quite clear.

Gurumurthy quotes Patel’s speech in Lucknow in which he chastises his “powerful”
colleagues in the Congress who wished to “crush” the “patriotic RSS”.

The “powerful” Congressmen being referred to must be those
led by Jawaharlal Nehru. Did this galaxy include Maulana Azad, president of the
Congress from 1939 to 46? I doubt it. His prestige has since taken such a
beating by sheer neglect that historian Ram Chandra Guha does not even mention
him among Makers of Modern India. He considers Hamid Dalwai more worthy of
mention.

The Maulana was “powerful” so long the real wielders of
power in the Congress allowed him to. Nehru, for instance. But once they had
made up their minds that they were full square behind the AICC resolution of
June 14, 1947 endorsing India’s
partition, Maulana Azad was an obstacle. There could have been no more weak and
isolated leaders as Maulana Azad and Badshah Khan.

When Patel suggested to RSS leader Golwalkar that the RSS
should join the Congress, the RSS supremo was quick with his response. The two
should work separately and “converge”. When, pray, would they “converge”? When
Hindu Rashtra has been achieved?

The first Home Secretary of Uttar Pradesh, Rajeshwar Dayal,
has in his autobiography, “A Life of Our Times”, this story about Golwalkar and
Congress stalwart, Govind Ballabh Pant, UP’s longest serving Chief Minister and
Union Home Minister from 1955 to 1961.

When communal tension in UP was high, Dayal carried
incontrovertible evidence to Pant about Golwalkar’s plans to create a “communal
holocaust in western UP”. Pant was convinced of the plot but he would not
permit them to arrest the RSS chief. In fact Golwalkar was allowed to escape,
having been duly tipped off.

“Came January 30, 1948 when Gandhi, the Supreme Apostle of
Peace, fell to a bullet fired by an RSS fanatic.” Dayal concludes: “The tragic
episode left me sick at heart”.